I, along with my colleagues who travelled from Mexico presented on an evaluation of a faculty development program – lovingly known as the Agora – designed around open pedagogy and it was fortuitous to catch a blog post by David Wiley and subsequent tweet storm prior to our last day, last session time slot. David’s post outlines a number of good provocations about How is Open Pedagogy Different? but ultimately niggled me in a way I found difficult to articulate. The crux of the argument was that the open pedagogy needs to be defined by the 5Rs, because if not, how was open pedagogy different from just plain old pedagogy.

Let me begin by saying that my own institution has benefitted greatly from OERs. We participate in developing and reusing open textbooks and are three years into developing a Zed Cred/Zee Degree, we have adapted two CC BY courses provided to us from Athabasca University, and we have without a doubt been able to innovate because others have been willing to share their open content. And we have to acknowledge that the 5Rs – which in my reading are framed around content but is something that is contested in in the tweet storm – provide good clarification for what open is in the context of OERs.

But I had to ponder whether OERs and the 5Rs have anything to do with open pedagogy. In other words:

Is content essential to open?

Can you have open pedagogy without OERs?

Is content what defines pedagogy?

And if we do assume that OERs are essential to open pedagogy, can we ever really move Beyond Content?

Back to our open pedagogy presentation. The Agora design process was focussed on what an open design would actually be a means to which can be summarized as:

Open as a means to facilitate a faculty culture of collaboration across the university and across disciplines

Open as a means to connect with a broader, global community

Open as means to challenge and expand existing understandings of student centre learning

Open as means to challenge ways of doing, in this case, the options and possibilities of digital technology and mobile learning

Open as a means to make the lives of faculty easier in their pursuit of better teaching and learning

Open as a means to create a sustainable approach to faculty development

Ultimately we did create content that fits quite nicely with the 5Rs, but the goal of our open pedagogy design process was not to create OERs as a means towards or even as an essential component of open pedagogy. The Agora was alternatively all of the ‘isms – behaviourism, connectivism, constructivism, constructionism – but the ism doesn’t really matter. Importantly, the open pedagogy design was at times technology-enabled and at times it didn’t use technology or the internet at all. OERs didn’t allow us to practice a different pedagogy, rather the open pedagogy of the Agora was a bricolage of activities and practices that at times resulted in OERs and at times didn’t.

If OERS and open content is a way for us to open the door a little bit more, then great. But it’s not the only way to open, and is not even a requirement in my view. And if I took anything away from #OER17, it’s that there are so many directions to explore, critique, challenge when we talk about open.

I’m travelling to #OER17 today for the first time, and I’ve got a lot to be excited about. Aside from occasional stopovers in Heathrow, it’ll be my first time back in the UK in about thirty (!) years, the conference organizers have put together an all female keynote lineup (!!), and the sessions around the theme of the Politics of Open look amazing and are right up my alley (!!!).

As a pretty regular attendee of open events here in Canada and beyond, I look forward to seeing many familiar faces and people I consider colleagues. But there are so many more that I see on Twitter but have never met, or see on Twitter and never get a chance to connect with at other events. And I suspect that there are so many I’ve never seen but should meet. I’d like to take a step towards changing that at OER17.

I’m pretty introverted (as a I suspect many ed tech people tend to be) and I’ve been told that I don’t always give off a come chat with me vibe. But here’s the thing…if we haven’t met, I’d really like to meet you. If you are interested in critical conversations about open, I’d like to meet you. If you are working with open in an non-English language context, I’d like to meet you. If your non English open activities have been adapted or translated into English contexts, I’d like to meet you.

The good folks at #OER17 have accepted my conference proposal on our University of Guadalajara faculty development program, which I positioned in the proposal as an example of an open pedagogy approach to faculty development. However the proposal acceptance is contingent on one thing: it was noted that I don’t define or link to any scholarly resources on open pedagogy, a very fair point and very useful feedback. And a bit sloppy on my part, if I’m quite honest.

This lead me down a rabbit hole this week, digging around for scholarly work on open pedagogy. The big surprise – although probably not to Vivian Rolfe who did a masterful job of a presentation at OpenEd16 this year digging into some history of open – is that the term open pedagogy dates back to the early 1970s, where it was actually quite a thing in Quebec and France. But does it mean what we think it means?

One of the oldest references comes from Canada’s own Claude Paquette, who in this article from 1979 states that open pedagogy has already been in place for almost 10 years, and lays out some foundational principles in his paper as well as this one from 2005. His 1995 paper talks about open pedagogy with a historical distance that can only be appreciated if you’ve embraced a novel idea and watched it succeed and fail simultaneously. Consider this passage for example:

The necessary rupture with textbook pedagogy charmed the most progressive and most innovative of us, while those for pedagogical renewal were only looking for new techniques to liven things up without questioning the foundation and practices. (my translation)

Paquette outlines 3 sets of foundational values of open pedagogy, namely: autonomy and interdependence; freedom and responsibility; democracy and participation. He goes into some detail about these, but us ed tech folks will recognize some of the themes – individualized learning, learner choice, self-direction, – to name a few. He even talks about “open activities” as the big innovation in open pedagogy, whereby students simultaneously use their multiple talents in learning situations, and this process of learning is “interactional” (aka social and connected). For Paquette, open is very much about learner choice, (albeit for him this is really about creating a classroom environment where this can be optimized). Good stuff right?

Of course, this becomes much more fascinating if you consider the sociopolitical context in which these ideas were playing out. Quebec had just experienced a cultural revolution which lead to a rupture of the stronghold of the Catholic church on pretty much all of Quebec society, and from which emerged, among other things, an educational reform and establishment of a CEGEP system in Quebec (tuition free post secondary colleges). This is significant in that prior to this rupture, post secondary education was largely accessible only to the (English) elite, and public education pretty much ended at age 14.

Meanwhile in Europe, there were similar educational reform ambitions and the language education world had embraced ideas of autonomy and self-direction in reaction to a number of sociocultural currents, which are nicely wrapped up for us in this 1995 article by Gremmo and Riley. There are quite a few gems to consider in here in the context of how we talk about open and open pedagogy currently. For example, the abstract starts us off with a bang in situating autonomy and self direction against a backdrop of:

Another gem discusses the role of technology in facilitating autonomy:

(4) Developments in technology have made an undeniable contribution to the spread of autonomy and self-success. The tape-recorder, the fast-copier, TV and the video-recorder, the computer, the photocopier, magazines, newspapers, fax and e-mail, all provide a rich variety of tools and techniques for the implementation of self-directed learning. In institutional terms, the facilities have been gathered together to form the resource centres (mediatheques, sound libraries, etc.) which will be discussed below. However, experience shows that the price of autonomy is eternal vigilance: there is a strong and repeated tendency for the introduction of some new technology by enthusiastic “technicians” to be accompanied by a retrograde and unreflecting pedagogy. A grammar drill on a computer is still a grammar drill and if learners are given little choice (or no training, which comes to the same thing) then it is a travesty to call their programmes “self-directed”. (p. 153)

Again, some familiar themes are discussed in this article: flexible learning, vast increases in university population, wider access to education, internationalism, commercialization.

So how does this compare to the foundational principles on which the current open pedagogy movement rests? At the moment, the current strand of open pedagogy seems to be defined by its use and creation of open materials. Consider for example this description from the OE consortium.

In other words, open pedagogy is currently a sort of proxy for the use and creation of open educational resources as opposed to being tied to a broader pedagogical objective. Of course, this isn’t to say that the OER movement lacks foundational values and broader objectives – if anything, so much of the 1970s open pedagogy and autonomy world seems to resonate. In fact, I find it quite fascinating that the authors of this post on the 8 qualities of open pedagogy seem to arrive at a similar place as our 1970s counterparts. But it does raise the question as to whether we are being ambitious enough in our articulations and aspirations for open pedagogy. And to Vivian Rolfe’s point made at OpenEd 16, are we are paying enough attention to voices of the past?